Freelance journalist Pierre and his friend Paul, a poet, join forces to pen a screenplay about Rosemonde, who may or not may not have shot her uncle many years earlier. Pierre pursues the facts while Paul begins to create a fictional Rosemonde — that is, until he meets her and oddly finds his creativity fading away. Meanwhile, both men become attracted to the young woman, but find it impossible to discover her true character.
SHADOW OF ANGELS is the film adaptation of R.W. Fassbinder’s last and most controversial play, “Garbage, the City, and Death,” which was banned in Germany. The story concerns Lily, a prostitute too beautiful to have clients and the real estate speculator she befriends. Lily is paid to listen to her customers’ despairing monologues about politics, power, corruption, and guilt. SHADOW OF ANGELS is quintessential Fassbinder, a fable about victims and victimizers and not so nascent neo-Nazi sympathies in post-war Germany.
A father is scheming to have his slightly mental daughter from an earlier marriage (Elsa Zylberstein) killed by allowing a murderous psychopath to be released from the asylum and led to his house. However, the psychopath and the daughter fall for each other.
In a village in eastern Turkey, tales of the economic success of Turks in Switzerland inspire Haydar to convince his wife Meryem that they must go. He sells their livestock and small plot of land in exchange for passage for two. He wants to leave their seven children in the care of the eldest and his parents; his father advises him to take one son to be educated in Europe, as economic insurance. The three set off for Istanbul, Milan, and Switzerland, stowing away on a ship. At Lake Como, they pay the rest of their money to unprincipled men who abandon them at an Alpine pass before a blizzard. Father and son are separated from Meryem. Will anyone reach the land of promise?
Aging German man Heinz Alfred Geise is a successful business owner whose past is quite haunting; during World War II he helped orchestrate a Nazi-led bloodbath in a small Greek village. When this secret is exposed in a newspaper article, it causes his son, Andreas, to try to kill both his father and himself.
In this Swiss detective drama a private investigator stumbles onto a case involving blackmail and an oversexed, under-aged girl. He finds the girl, and, tragically, becomes involved with her.
Clive Langham spends one tormenting night in his bed suffering from health problems and thinking up a story based on his relatives. He is a bitter man and he shows, through flashbacks, how spiteful, conniving and treacherous his family is. But is this how they really are or is it his own vindictive slant on things?
After the death of his mother, middle-aged insurance employee inherits her small cottage surrounded by a garden. Selling the cottage which is situated on unexploited ground near the center of a big city makes him a rich man and he buys a big house in the countryside. He takes some time off and decides to throw a big garden party at the house and invite all his colleagues from the office. Aided by alcohol, the guests gradually lose all their inhibitions and reveal personality traits and frustrations that they normally keep hidden.
